Jan. 24, 2013

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Wesley Worman inspects an old firefighter uniform on display at the Windsor Fire Museum. / Carol Hirata/For the Beacon

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Two pictures hang on the wall of Windsor’s old railroad depot.

One grainy black-and-white panoramic photo shows the town in 1910, outlining its small buildings and dirt roads. Directly below that hangs the other, another black-and-white photo taken in 2005.

They’re drastically different, of course, which is something Carrie Knight, the town’s arts and heritage manager, told a group of Range View Elementary second-graders on a field trip Wednesday.

“Some things have changed and some things have stayed the same,” Knight said to a small section of the 90 students. “That’s what history’s all about.”

Broken into different groups with teachers and parent chaperones, the four second-grade classes got to experience a walking tour of Windsor’s history. They toured the railroad depot, visited the Windsor-Severance Fire Museum and saw “Bittersweet Harvest,” a traveling Smithsonian exhibition at the Windsor Museum.

It was the first time Range View students have gone on a field trip highlighting the town’s history.

In addition to the museums, some of the classes also got to tour a small home called a “shanty,” which had two tiny rooms and showed how Windsor beet farmers lived in the early 1900s.

Robert Toth, a parent chaperone and volunteer at Range View, showed the shanty to a small group of the students, highlighting how different things were back then.

Instead of electric stoves, they were manually heated by burning coal or wood. Instead of living with your immediate family, tiny homes were shared with aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents.

“The big thing about them coming here and seeing places like this is for them to realize what they have and maybe appreciate it a little more,” Toth said.

At the fire museum, the students climbed into an old fire truck that used to cruise Windsor’s streets and looked at photos, old equipment and the things that shaped Windsor Severance Fire Rescue into what it is today.

If they still had questions after the tours or wanted to learn more about a specific thing, teachers encouraged students to write in their “inquiry notebooks” and bring them back to class.

“I think it’s important for them to know how our town started,” said Jennifer Ranum, a second-grade teacher who helped coordinate the trip. “It’s fun for them to know where people came from and how life has changed.”

“This is our first field trip like this,” she added. “But it won’t be our last.”